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I didn't like the dark age fiction, but I got into BT miniatures thanks to the clicktech stuff. The execution had flaws, but like Crazy Joe is saying they really were ahead of the time with how it was all IP3 structured and aimed at revitalizing a dead game. Dunno if the quality was really there. But hey I got a bunch of the kickstarter models to play alpha strike 
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May 4, 2021 22:29
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There are a fair number of pros and cons to MW:DA/AoD. Pros: - Clix games were relatively quick to play and there were a lot of them at the time so the rules were relatively easy for people used to other Clix games to pick up. - MW:DA had better balance (speaking generally) than classic BattleTech, because they threw out all the numbers and did something else. - MW:DA had a lower* barrier to entry for new players, since everything came pre-painted. - The Vehicle sculpts were nearly all pretty ok at a minimum and some of them are genuinely nice. - Infantry was useful. Cons: - Despite having a low barrier for entry, *collecting a usable battleforce was hard and expensive. Random or semi-random blind boxes make it really hard to field an interesting force without spending a lot of money (good for WizKids, bad for a game where players were used to just going out and buying the minis they wanted). If, instead of blind boxes, they'd released lance or battleforce boxes where you knew what you were getting and could focus and collect one faction if all you wanted were - The minis were nearly always hideous in a way that can't be explained away through simple cheapness. The 'Mechs were articulated in three places (hips, arms), but making them more action figure -esque to appeal to younger children means the concessions they had to make to get those points of articulation left the minis looking some combination of lanky, blocky, ungainly, or just plain ugly. They also skipped or altered a fair number of iconic designs in ways that made long-time fans go "What's this poo poo?" The Nova in particular is pretty dire, but the MW:DA Spider and Catapult are both equally unrecognizable. They also weren't durable enough at the joints and it was super easy to snap off an arm or a hand or the waist. - De-emphasizing the giant robots was a mistake the setting still hasn't recovered from. IIRC the best forces in MW:DA were artillery-heavy vehicle formations with chaff infantry support. If you're only going to have 1 or 2 'Mechs per side, the 'Mechs have to be really good--like: sweep the entire non-'Mech opforce good if they're not intercepted good--in order to compensate for their rarity. The 'Mechs in MW:DA were bad trap options that were usually a mistake to field (except for the Catapult or other long-range artillery 'Mechs). "Mechs are rare and special" is at odds with miniature sales and new 'Mechs designs. You can't afford to have a one-off specialist that's really good at one specific thing if your planet only has two 'Mechs, but nearly every post-MW:DA design is a weirdo specialist because strong good-at-everything generalists are OP and don't make for fun fights. The setting needs big armies with lots of robots for the fun specialist designs to make sense. - MW:DA made the universe feel smaller, both by skipping past events that sounded like they might have been interesting (the WOB Jihad), killing off a lot of characters, and by concentrating all the action and storytelling into the Terran Hegemony and ignoring nearly everything going on outside the Republic. Who's related to Victor Steiner-Davion now? Half of the Republic's leadership? Everyone but Daoshen Liao? Great. - Clix games were already losing steam when MW:DA was introduced. Mage Knight's intentional power creep had burned up a lot of good will a few months before MW:DA, and I remember street-level grumbling about Mage Knight that poisoned the well for a lot of other new Clix games. "Want to stay competative? Better keep buying blind boxes!" A complaint Magic the Gathering survived but Mage Knight did not. There was a huge glut of Clix that released at nearly the same time as MW:DA, too. Heroclix, some Alien vs. Predator thing, the classic Mage Knight, Crimson Skies, Halo Clix, HorrorClix, Star Trek Attack Wing, probably more I can't remember. They all did the same thing and played roughly the same way and competed with one another for attention, and MW:DA's only real innovation was the overheat dial. I thin Heroclix is the only game that really survived in any fashion. - The MW:DA novels were really fascist, even for BattleTech. BattleTech always had a bit of a problem with fascist apologia, but most of the worst fascist undertones were undercut by all the "great men" of the setting being insecure fuckups while the Inner Sphere prospered in spite of them. In MW:DA, the entire universe revolved around Devlin Stone. He made the - Gone is the tacit understanding that BattleTech's old tagline: "Life is cheap, BattleMechs are expensive" is a complete lie (the Mechwarriors were always what mattered, their machines not so much). The Clix 'Mechs had pilots, but there was only one that mattered in any faction (and usually they were someone embarrassing like Katana Tormark). The only thing that matters in MW:DA is the machine and the numbers it gets on its dial(s). -This one isn't MW:DA's fault: the "no more mercenaries" rule after the stupid Eridani Light Pony lawsuit really limited the setting. Everything had to be tied to a pre-existing setting element to minimize risk. I don't hate what MW:DA tried to do. Getting more people interested in the setting is great, attracting new players is pretty vital for any game. But WizKids didn't put any thought into player retention. BattleTech was already a multimedia franchise, so you can't really praise MW:DA for doing something the setting had been doing since the late 1980s. BattleTech novels had a huge presence in bookstores in the 1990s and early 2000s. You were guaranteed to see Star Wars, Star Trek, and BattleTech in any bookstore you walked into. Amazon slowly strangling every bookstore in the world to death had more to do with BattleTech "dying" than anything, and until the Kickstarter, Catalyst really hadn't done a great job establishing a web presence. BattleCorps was this weird official/unofficial thing and charging for short stories just meant nobody was really signing up to read them. A part of me is hoping the Kickstarter is the start of a BattleTech resurgence; but I suspect it may be the setting's last gasp. Catalyst is once again trading on the setting's past successes and fan favorite designs and where do you go once you're out of those? The answer is: to an alternate universe so you can re-release all the fan favorite 'Mechs again in a different setting with different factions and different balance considerations; but Cataylst is still really nervous after MW:DA's reception. The problem with MW:DA wasn't the timeskip, it was WizKids failing to account for people wanting to play with the minis they already owned. My biggest hope for the future is that Catalyst will go all-in on 3D printing now that the kickstarter is wrapping up and in-home 3D printing is really taking off. BattleMechs are uniquely suited to 3D printing and they've already got 3D modelers on staff. They also have new 3D models of every 'Mech from the kickstarter that they could do a lot with if they put their minds to it. If they released reposes (or variant loadouts) of all the new 'Mechs in six months as official pre-supported .STL files I think they'd have a real market. They could even add in a subscription service, where they release an .STL or three to monthly subscribers alongside fiction a-la Shrapnel. No idea whether or not that'd tread on IWM's toes, but if they can sell packaged lances they should be able to sell .STL lance packs. Couple that with either a total balance pass (with or without an "official" alternate universe) so people can keep using their favorite minis, but with potentially different and balanced loadouts; and/or release another quickplay game (or Alpha Strike expansion) that serves as a middle ground between BattleTech and Alpha Strike (say: Alpha Strike's abstracted movement and cover, but with individual weapons or MW:Destiny style weapon groups (so you can stealthily make medium lasers and Clantech worse) and a handful of hit locations (1d6: Torso, Torso, Torso, Right Arm, Left Arm, Legs?) to cut down on Clan 'Mech rocket tag and I think they'd do better than they would with an (inevitable?) Wobbie or Dark Age 'Mech kickstarter. Hire me, Catalyst (I'm kidding, I'm probably not qualified)! If the fanbase wants you to release the same 'Mechs over and over there are ways you can make that into a working business model! TLDR: I thought about this too much while bored at work. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 01:22 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 01:20
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PoptartsNinja posted:A part of me is hoping the Kickstarter is the start of a BattleTech resurgence; but I suspect it may be the setting's last gasp. Catalyst is once again trading on the setting's past successes and fan favorite designs and where do you go once you're out of those? The answer is: to an alternate universe so you can re-release all the fan favorite 'Mechs again in a different setting with different factions and different balance considerations; but Cataylst is still really nervous after MW:DA's reception. The problem with MW:DA wasn't the timeskip, it was WizKids failing to account for people wanting to play with the minis they already owned. I hope that they take the KS as an indication of where their ceiling is and plan around that, rather than looking at it as "where we are now" and trying to go forward expecting those numbers. Knowing you have X amount of fans who are willing to spent any money at all and Y amount who are willing to spend more than twenty bucks can be useful data.
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May 5, 2021 01:35
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That too, but even those numbers aren't necessarily long-term sustainable, they're more like a peak. If they tried a Wobbie or Dark Ages Kickstarter they might not achieve half of what they did with the Clan Invasion kickstarter. I'm willing to shell out more for a Timberwolf and an Atlas than I would be for a Thanatos and an Archangel or a Legionnaire and a
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May 5, 2021 01:43
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The positives of MechWarrior Dark Age were what got me buying Battletech miniatures altogether. Before that it was only video games here and there. We had a lot of fun playing in weekly tournaments at the FLGS and collecting our favorite units. I think what killed it for us was people, uh, going to college or getting girlfriends or having part-time jobs on the tournament night. Once attendance dried up, that was it and it vanished completely from our area. Game still went on to a second edition and had a few more years in it before it died. I really wanted to jump back into 2e when I found out it was less blind purchasing, but by that point I had gone off to university and gaming was just not something that was in my world anymore. Years later, and I wish the clix version was still around as a simple entry point for my kid and I to enjoy together. Oh well.
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May 5, 2021 01:55
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Have you tried Alpha Strike? It's really similar to Clix except the 'Mech stats are on paper. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 02:13 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 01:58
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My kid just turned 5, so having chonky pieces of plastic with dials and a color-coded reference card were part of the appeal. I'm thinking Deadzone might be the easiest way to go actually teaching him to play his first minis game because someone made a cool as heck list builder where you can upload photos of your own models and you get a start card for each unit in your force that is mostly symbol based. I could print and laminate those pretty easily.
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May 5, 2021 02:06
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Ah, I gotcha. Yeah, I don't think the MW:DA clix would've been great for that. My Koshi lost a hand in its blind box, I found the robits pretty fragile which was a real shame. Some better sculpts with a little more durability and I could see that really working. Actually, I could see entry-level BattleTech working pretty well as a product line. Double the mini size (which should be pretty easy since Catalyst has full 3D models for all of them) and release them in PVC, like Reaper Bones, so they're paintable but really durable. Then release a version of the rules with some kid-friendly math and maybe some very basic terrain. Set it on a new Solaris VII equivalent where killing your opponent is an instant disqualification so it's all fights for fun and then do the 55 tonner quad: Shadow Hawk, Griffin, Wolverine, and Dervish, a couple assault 'Mechs like the Atlas and BattleMaster, a couple lights like the Locust and Spider, and a couple of heavies like the Thunderbolt and Catapult... PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 02:45 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 02:18
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I appreciate the indestructibility of the newer IWM stuff. I dare you to try and damage the new Thud sculpt.
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May 5, 2021 02:27
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PoptartsNinja posted:Ah, I gotcha. Yeah, I don't think the MW:DA clix would've been great for that. My Koshi lost a hand in its blind box, I found the robits pretty fragile which was a real shame. Some better sculpts with a little more durability and I could see that really working. I could try the intro rules, yeah. And he's grown up around my minis so he's actually pretty good at handling them, especially light plastics. The thing with the MWDA models even if they snap at joints is that I don't actually care. I can either pop it back on or glue it and it's not a 3 hour paint job that's been ruined. That's key with 5 year olds.
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May 5, 2021 02:42
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Defiance Industries posted:He was set up as a hegemon and then got to dictate the size of everyone else's army, that looks pretty subservient to me. FM:3085 specifically notes that House Kurita wants to raise new regiments but the Republic will not let them. Also, what rebellions was House Davion facing on Achernar or Addicks? I'm not aware of FM 3085 saying that, that's kind of strange, because in every other bit of fiction it is said that the Great Houses felt internal pressure to disarm so their people could have things like food and purified water again. Who knows, the Sourcebooks are listed as below novels in terms of canonicity, and no novel ever says Stone "forced" disarmament. quote:They shouldn't never be rational, either. People make mistakes, but it shouldn't be the exact same mistake that their government made before that resulted in the most famous massacre in history. Yvonne's big talking point at the end of the Jihad was "never again" and rebuilding the army around a new defensive paradigm, not "let's disarm so the Combine can murder us." When the decisions that get someone to a bad place aren't reasonable ones, the audience doesn't feel any sympathy for them and so the whole thing is rendered pointless. House Davion got hosed up 100% thanks to Caleb Davion. Prior to the Palymra disaster they had between 45-50 regiments, to the Combine's 39 and Liao's 51. Palymra cost them 14 regiments, and they lost another 5 or more in the fighting immediately after, according to Field Manual 3145. PoptartNinja posted:- The minis were nearly always hideous in a way that can't be explained away through simple cheapness. I'll agree that some of the early designs were pretty horrible, although I think stuff like the Centurion and Spider still look way better than the original walking box designs 99% of CBT mechs were before MWO. The designs also got a lot better by AoD expansion. quote:- De-emphasizing the giant robots was a mistake the setting still hasn't recovered from. IIRC the best forces in MW:DA were artillery-heavy vehicle formations with chaff infantry support. That was true in the early part of the game but was rectified over time. By the last 2 years every Championship army had 2 or more mechs, which accounted for 50% or more of the army values being played. Mechless armies were a thing true, but it wasn't 100% of the time. quote:- Clix games were already losing steam when MW:DA was introduced. Mechwarrior DA was introduced in 2002, 2 year after Heroclix and Mage Knight. It lasted til 2008. I wouldn't say clix games were already running out of steam just 2 years in. The most popular years for MW:DA from my playing time was 2004/2005. You're absolutely right that Wizkids oversaturated the market with too many similar products (although I do have a soft spot for Horrorclix, given that it did a lot of IP crossovers like Hellboy, so Hellboy could literally punch out Cthulhu in game), and that was a big complaint among the player base at the time. Had they just stuck with the Big 3 (MK, Heroclix, and Mechwarrior), they might still be around today. quote:The MW:DA novels were really fascist, even for BattleTech. BattleTech always had a bit of a problem with fascist apologia Plenty of nations have managed to have "Founding Father" myths that don't delve into Fascism. The Republic worshipped Stone true, but even in the books outside of the Republic Stone caught some flak. And I find it hard to square a mutli-ethnic/religious republic that prizes diversity and tolerance among its founding principles (The Triarii Regiment's motto is literally "Strength through diversity") as fascist apologia. I don't know, I just don't see it. quote:- Gone is the tacit understanding that BattleTech's old tagline: "Life is cheap, BattleMechs are expensive" is a complete lie (the Mechwarriors were always what mattered, their machines not so much). The Clix 'Mechs had pilots, but there was only one that mattered in any faction (and usually they were someone embarrassing like Katana Tormark). The only thing that matters in MW:DA is the machine and the numbers it gets on its dial(s). Maybe I'm misunderstanding the critique, but each faction typically had a number of usable unique mechs, and when pilot cards came in, pilot abilities gave you a lot of variety. quote:- Despite having a low barrier for entry, *collecting a usable battleforce was hard and expensive. Random or semi-random blind boxes make it really hard to field an interesting force without spending a lot of money (good for WizKids, bad for a game where players were used to just going out and buying the minis they wanted). If, instead of blind boxes, they'd released lance or battleforce boxes where you knew what you were getting and could focus and collect one faction if all you wanted were Zap Brannigan's Roughnecks Bannison's Raiders or Spirit Cats they could've bridged the gap between old players wanting to buy the 'Mechs that interested them (and getting some minis they don't want in the process) without losing out too much. The blind boxes were what made me skip MW:DA, I bought two blind boxes, got a Koshi and a fat Spider, and said "Nope." I get the criticism of the blind box, but honestly, as another poster said, it was a smart business decision. I think the best thing to do would've been to have a "best of both worlds", with blind boxes having the majority of pieces, and "faction packs" that contained some solid starting pieces for whatever faction you were looking to buy. They did start to do this in the end, 3 or 4 factions got "faction packs", and they were really popular, but by then the Great Recession was sweeping in and plastic prices were going through the roof. quote:TLDR: I thought about this too much while bored at work. Same. Atlas Hugged posted:The positives of MechWarrior Dark Age were what got me buying Battletech miniatures altogether. Before that it was only video games here and there. We had a lot of fun playing in weekly tournaments at the FLGS and collecting our favorite units. I think what killed it for us was people, uh, going to college or getting girlfriends or having part-time jobs on the tournament night. Once attendance dried up, that was it and it vanished completely from our area. Game still went on to a second edition and had a few more years in it before it died. I really wanted to jump back into 2e when I found out it was less blind purchasing, but by that point I had gone off to university and gaming was just not something that was in my world anymore. The same thing happened in our community; half the playing group went off to college and couldn't come back to play. Also our FLGS closed up in 2006, as the owner wanted to move to Las Vegas, so we lost our common playing venue.
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May 5, 2021 13:56
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:I'm not aware of FM 3085 saying that, that's kind of strange, because in every other bit of fiction it is said that the Great Houses felt internal pressure to disarm so their people could have things like food and purified water again. Who knows, the Sourcebooks are listed as below novels in terms of canonicity, and no novel ever says Stone "forced" disarmament. Doesn't really work that way. No novel ever said that Jerome Blake was a real big rear end in a top hat but we know that's true. And the sourcebooks constantly correct fuckups in the novels, like units magically reforming or Stackpole not doing his research. quote:House Davion got hosed up 100% thanks to Caleb Davion. Prior to the Palymra disaster they had between 45-50 regiments, to the Combine's 39 and Liao's 51. Palymra cost them 14 regiments, and they lost another 5 or more in the fighting immediately after, according to Field Manual 3145. That and the decades of malaise leaving them incompetent and promoting people based on social connections. quote:Plenty of nations have managed to have "Founding Father" myths that don't delve into Fascism. The Republic worshipped Stone true, but even in the books outside of the Republic Stone caught some flak. And I find it hard to square a mutli-ethnic/religious republic that prizes diversity and tolerance among its founding principles (The Triarii Regiment's motto is literally "Strength through diversity") as fascist apologia. It seems a lot like the right-wing fantasy of being oppressed, with "forced diversity" being created at gunpoint and the expressed goal of the obliteration of traditional cultural identity. Which would square with their first novel being about a terrorist organization operating under the guise of an environmental organization (so that Stackpole's self-insert can beat up a woman)
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May 5, 2021 17:41
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Plenty of nations have managed to have "Founding Father" myths that don't delve into Fascism. The Republic worshipped Stone true, but even in the books outside of the Republic Stone caught some flak. And I find it hard to square a mutli-ethnic/religious republic that prizes diversity and tolerance among its founding principles (The Triarii Regiment's motto is literally "Strength through diversity") as fascist apologia. The very first MW:DA novel introduces the Ghost Knights, a group of super duper black ops agents with no accountability except to themselves and the current leader of the Republic, empowered with the ability to summarily execute anyone they want for any (or no) reason and pointed directly (and exclusively) at the Republic's own citizens. The first Ghost Knight we're introduced to beats up and eventually murders a bunch of relatively harmless environmental protestors that are being manipulated by a known but not proven terrorist. Victor Davion explicitly calls the Ghost Knights wolfhounds who exist to eliminated undesirable elements from within the Republic. The loyal "dog of the state" who hunts "wolves" that are a threat to the state is fascist as hell. The very first thing the Republic did after its formation was commit numerous acts of cultural genocide by forcibly breaking up and relocating any population that was over a certain percentage one single culture, including forcibly resettling the worst offenders to different planets where they would have no support network. I need to emphasize: Devlin Stone hadn't even started the WoB Nuremberg trials before the genocide The Republic's citizenship programs were based on the Capellan Confederation's. They're slightly tamer in that they don't outright enslave their noncitizens but they explicitly create a 'superior class' of people who "get poo poo done for the Republic" (rather than racism, which is a moderate step up). This is something BattleTech has always struggled with but quietly undercut because the hereditary nobility were nearly always gently caress-ups who didn't deserve the power they'd inherited and the only "good" nobles were the ones who recognized their own unworthiness. It's pretty telling that Daoshen Laio, who is explicitly insane, has been the best Chancellor the Capellan Confederation has ever had because his particular brand of insanity forces him to live 'for the Capellan people' because he sees himself as an extension of their collective will. The Republic spends most of its time developing wunderwaffen like the Ares and the RISC Hyper Laser. Devlin Stone's master plan was "put myself in cryogenic sleep" (a technology that has not existed in BattleTech before), wait until the Great Houses finish disarming, and then destroy the HPG network so he could conquer them all in one fell swoop and complete the objective the Word of Blake programmed into him as a child. His two major downfalls were A) pissing off Daoshen Lao, ensuring that the Capellan Confederation would begin a major build up and always be laser focused on the Republic; and B) that someone set the plan in motion too soon and crippled the Republic before they hit Stone's Tripod Ubermech quota. quote:That was true in the early part of the game but was rectified over time. By the last 2 years every Championship army had 2 or more mechs, which accounted for 50% or more of the army values being played. Mechless armies were a thing true, but it wasn't 100% of the time. This doesn't really address the bigger narrative problem though. BattleTech is a game that's currently "balanced" around specialist 'Mechs that are good at a few things and not so good at other things because generalists are usually too powerful. When all your planetary militia has is four 'Mechs you don't buy a 'Mech that's only good at shooting down helicopters or airplanes, you buy a 'Mech that's capable of doing a little bit of everything and probably has hands so it can pitch in for disaster relief too. "They take what they can get" doesn't really cover that because the game has enough cheap generalists that 90% of the 'Mechs in the Federated Suns should be the Watchman or one of its variant chassis. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 18:02 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 17:56
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Defiance Industries posted:Doesn't really work that way. No novel ever said that Jerome Blake was a real big rear end in a top hat but we know that's true. And the sourcebooks constantly correct fuckups in the novels, like units magically reforming or Stackpole not doing his research. TPTB have stated that novels trump sourcebooks when it comes to canon. That is not my own head-canon, that is straight from the Line Developers themselves. If there is 1 line in a sourcebook and 10 lines in different novels that contradict it, the novels win. PoptartsNinja posted:The very first MW:DA novel introduces the Ghost Knights, a group of super duper black ops agents with no accountability except to themselves and the current leader of the Republic, empowered with the ability to summarily execute anyone they want for any (or no) reason and pointed directly (and exclusively) at the Republic's own citizens. In the fiction we've met approximately 6 or 7 Ghost Knights. Here were their targets. Mason Dunne - Investigating corrupt Legates and homegrown Terrorist networks (meets your definition) Reo Jones - Investigating Bannson's Raiders on Wyatt (meets your definition, I guess?) 4 Ghost Knights in Surrender Your Dreams (1 is sabotaging CJF technology research, 2 are instigating a conflict in Marik space by causing war crimes, and 1 is again investigating a corrupt Planetary Governor who is attacking RAF troops). 1 Ghost Knight in the Highlander Covenant (Seeded into House Liao Intelligence agency, instigates a conflict between Kurita and Liao during the Battle of Northwind). 1 Ghost Knight (Or Loki Agent) that was in Kurita space sabotaging their efforts to invade the Republic, then goes to the CJF invasion to sabotage their efforts there. 8 Ghost Knights, 3 meeting your definition, 5 that do not. I will grant you, they do commit war crimes and generally don't have to answer to anybody, except for apparently the Head of Intelligence according to the latest novel, same as virtually every other Inner Sphere intelligence agency (Hello, is LOKI there?) quote:The first Ghost Knight we're introduced to beats up and eventually murders a bunch of relatively harmless environmental protestors that are being manipulated by a known but not proven terrorist. Victor Davion explicitly calls the Ghost Knights wolfhounds who exist to eliminated undesirable elements from within the Republic. The loyal "dog of the state" who hunts "wolves" that are a threat to the state is fascist as hell. I get it, a lot of the early part of Ghost War is pretty loving gross, but literally the second time the Environmental front shows up they attempt to sabotage a work site and kill the workers, and then get into a protracted fire fight with the local planetary militia using machine guns? They later go on to try to blow up a military headquarters using heavy ordinance? Do you define that as harmless? quote:The very first thing the Republic did after its formation was commit numerous acts of cultural genocide by forcibly breaking up and relocating any population that was over a certain percentage one single culture, including forcibly resettling the worst offenders to different planets where they would have no support network. I need to emphasize: Devlin Stone hadn't even started the WoB Nuremberg trials before the genocide began resumed. I won't argue this point, except just point out that most of that program was voluntary (I.E. pay big stipends if families willingly relocate). The forcible stuff is obviously horrible though. quote:The Republic's citizenship programs were based on the Capellan Confederation's. Again, won't disagree with this point. I hadn't thought about the Starship Troopers similarity there. From a story perspective I always thought this citizenship program was really stupid, as it created a lot of resentment from anyone not a citizen. quote:The Republic spends most of its time developing wunderwaffen like the Ares and the RISC Hyper Laser. I mean, wonder weapons are not necessarily a domain of fascist states. Every state is always trying to innovate and create better weapons, but again I see your point. And Devlin Stone, like I said, starting to believe in his own hype to a dangerous degree. He created the Republic and is pretty much 99% responsible for its collapse through his really terrible decision-making. All in all, I can see your point a lot better now with these examples. I still have to disagree that the novels were "really fascist" I don't see anyone walking away from them thinking forced cultural resettlement is a good thing, especially since the novels over and over again stress all the different ethnic groups rising up and saying "gently caress you Republic". Can you argue the Republic had fascist policies, perhaps, but there are still other far worse state offenders in the Battletech universe than the Republic. Crazy Joe Wilson fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 18:25
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:TPTB have stated that novels trump sourcebooks when it comes to canon. That is not my own head-canon, that is straight from the Line Developers themselves. If there is 1 line in a sourcebook and 10 lines in different novels that contradict it, the novels win. So they wrote the intro to the 2SW sourcebook as some kind of non-canon thing? And the parts of the FCCWSB that are explicitly there to fix mistakes in the novels was added for... fun? Because your argument is "I can't find it in a novel" which no poo poo, the novel line was dead before FM:3085. TPTB also says newer sources beat older ones.
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May 5, 2021 18:40
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Defiance Industries posted:So they wrote the intro to the 2SW sourcebook as some kind of non-canon thing? And the parts of the FCCWSB that are explicitly there to fix mistakes in the novels was added for... fun? Because your argument is "I can't find it in a novel" which no poo poo, the novel line was dead before FM:3085. TPTB also says newer sources beat older ones. Fair points. I'm just saying that a single line in a sourcebook that would seem to contradict a bunch of novels is a little strange is all. Perhaps in a future product they'll actually explain how Stone did that, but they probably won't, because the idea that Stone could force other militaries to disarm is a dumb one, and it was probably a 1-off line that someone didn't think about. Or they didn't read the all the Dark Age stuff put out by Wizkids too closely and just went "Yeah dumb Dark Age stuff of course Stone forced them to do X, what was Wizkids thinking oh well gotta write it down."
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May 5, 2021 18:48
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The MWDA novels are written from the perspective of Republic citizens most of the time. Of course THEY would think that it was voluntary, that's the only view they've been presented with. They also would have needed to square disarmament with the character of Kiyomori Minamoto, who was really just a random name in FM:DC at the time the early Dark Age was made rather than the Shogun-with-puppet-Emperor character he becomes over the course of the Jihad. It wouldn't make sense for this guy who is 100% about turning back the clock to the golden years of Takashi Kurita to scale down the army, it's literally everything to him.
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May 5, 2021 19:07
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:same as virtually every other Inner Sphere intelligence agency (Hello, is LOKI there?) Loki, the Maskirovka, and the ISF (and to a lesser extent MI1-5) are all explicitly evil, even when they're viewpoint characters. The only state intelligence agency that isn't presented as a band of murderous thugs is House Marki's SAFE (and that's because they only appear in two novels and are presented as being bumbling incompetents instead). The MW:DA novels try to sell you on the Ghost Knights being the good guys (rather than a "necessary evil") from book one. This is the "hard men making hard choices" thing I called out for being bullshit. "Hard men making hard choices" really means "Hard men making expedient and evil choices" a-la killing Greenpeace because it's expedient rather than attempting to negotiate with them first. Stackpole didn't want the environmentalists to be sympathetic so he never presented them as reasonable actors and even then the strawman environmentalist terrorists were only able to have their machinegun battles with the police because Mason Dunne emboldened them by signing on as a mercenary Mechwarrior. The plan to blow up government buildings was at least partially presented by Mason. Could someone else have emboldened them? Absolutely. But getting them to expose their leadership by helping them commit terrorism was Mason Dunne's entire mission. quote:Again, won't disagree with this point. I hadn't thought about the Starship Troopers similarity there. From a story perspective I always thought this citizenship program was really stupid, as it created a lot of resentment from anyone not a citizen. It's all a reminder that military fiction is at least a little fascist, it's just the nature of the beast. The line developers have been quietly reinforcing the Republic was less-than-benevolent for decades; but when the setting first came out in an immediately post 9/11 world the Republic was presented as the good guys who could do no wrong and were justified for committing torture and etc, etc. I hate bringing up Pardoe and Coleman as examples, but even when they're pushing the "one man's terrorist is another man's patriot" angle with Loren Jaffrey and Aris Sung, Loren ultimately rejects his mission and betrays his nation (which was the decision Sun Tzu wanted him to make); or in Aris Sung's case, is held accountable for his choices and could easily have been summarily executed after the fact. Of the two, only Loren Jaffrey's betrayal of the Capellan Confederation is held up as a heroic decision because it was the actual hard choice that required him to break his cultural programming to preserve something he'd decided was more important than his upbringing (the Northwind Highlanders). A lot of it boils down to BattleTech's use of untrustworthy narrators. 'Way of the Clans' is the best example, showing just how existentially terrifying the Clan way of life is (they brainwash child soldiers until all they're really capable of doing is gambling with each other, egotism, and killing). Aidan "wants" to become a Clan warrior and can't function in society once he fails but rolling back to the very beginning of his life he was fascinated with stories and adventure and probably would have become a writer or some other form of storyteller if he hadn't been indoctrinated. He was naïve, careless, and exactly the sort of person the Clan system was designed to weed out. If Bloodname and Falcon Guard had been better at showing that making him a warrior anyway had actually been a huge mistake (Falcon Guard came close but wasn't quite there), we'd consider Thurston to be the second best BattleTech author after Robert N. Charette. Way of the Clans is right up there with Wolves on the Border if you read it understanding it's a dystopian horror story. I've come to genuinely like and appreciate the MW:DA era now that the Republic isn't being portrayed as the perfect shining city on a hill. I even have an entire company of Bannson's Raiders because 3145 Donald Trump makes a good villain and I am eager to see where ilClan takes the setting. I can't confirm this because after Ghost War I just couldn't bring myself to pick up another MW:DA novel; but you mentioned the books don't get good until six to eight novels or so in: is that about the same time the Republic stops being presented as the 100% morally justified "good guy" and starts being presented as morally ambiguous or otherwise less-than-benevolent? PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 19:51
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I think that's around the point they stop doing purely Republic stories and go back to writing about the Inner Sphere. The Jade Falcon invasion starts around then, which brings the LCAF into play and things sort of cascade from there. I remember the last few novels, which are largely about the reformation of the Free Worlds League, being a pretty decent read.
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May 5, 2021 20:08
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PoptartsNinja posted:Loki, the Maskirovka, and the ISF (and to a lesser extent MI1-5) are all explicitly evil, even when they're viewpoint characters. The only state intelligence agency that isn't presented as a band of murderous thugs is House Marki's SAFE (and that's because they only appear in two novels and are presented as being bumbling incompetents instead). The MW:DA novels try to sell you on the Ghost Knights being the good guys (rather than a "necessary evil") from book one. This is the "hard men making hard choices" thing I called out for being bullshit. "Hard men making hard choices" really means "Hard men making expedient and evil choices" a-la killing Greenpeace because it's expedient rather than attempting to negotiate with them first. It's been years since i read it but I remember the novels getting better around The Scorpion Jar. It and the Jade Falcon invasion novels felt more like Battletech than what came before in MW:DA.
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May 5, 2021 20:23
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PoptartsNinja posted:I can't confirm this because after Ghost War I just couldn't bring myself to pick up another MW:DA novel; but you mentioned the books don't get good until six to eight novels or so in: is that about the same time the Republic stops being presented as the 100% morally justified "good guy" and starts being presented as morally ambiguous or otherwise less-than-benevolent? I agree with 90% of what you posted (I still like Mason Dunne, but maybe that's just because his figure in the game was pretty good and as a 13 y.o. you don't notice the problems with some of those scenes) so I'll just quote and answer this. I'd say the first really good book (I include #1 and #2 but that's my preference) is Fortress of Lies #8, which while it's all inside the Republic deals with the Machievellian politics of the Swordsworn and Sandoval dynasty backstabbing each other while trying to not-die to the Liao Invasion. Then Flight of the Falcon #9 is pretty typical Battletech, letting you see how crazy CJF has gotten after 60 years of no Crusade. I guess By Temptation and By Lies is good, but it's kinda Loren Coleman doing the whole "terrorist is a hero" thing. The subplot about Ezekiel Crow trying to die a hero is cool though. I'd say the Republic still stays the "white hat good guys" (But with some grey) up until #23, Surrender Your Dreams, written by Pardoe. Scorpion Jar (#12), Sword of Sedition (#14), and Fortress Republic (#18) all show the Republic collapsing and dealing with a Civil War caused by power-hungry nobles and over-zealous Knights, with Jonah Levin trying to stop it from falling apart. There's maybe one scene in Fortress where a Republic force gets pissed at the Davions for letting Liao use one of their planets as a jumping-off point to attack the ROTS and they attack both sides. SYD is where you have Ghost Knights literally doing war crimes to distract any foreign enemies to give the Fortress Republic time to recover. After that the Republic doesn't really appear again in the fiction line, as novels #24-31 all have to do with the Steiner/Wolf invasion of House Marik (Which I would say is some of the best Battletech fiction out there, only because you finally get a Royal Family who does the whole 'have kids and use them to secure dynastic alliances' thing. Also, just mentioning, you can include SAFE as evil because in #27 Jessica Marik orders them to stage a false flag op designed to look like a Wobbie attack, that ends up killing 10,000 civilians at a ski resort, to get Regulus to look the other way while Jessica captures the planet Marik (Regulus gets her back by assassinating her oldest son Janos). Crazy Joe Wilson fucked around with this message at 20:49 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 20:44
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SAFE had to git gud to become evil.
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May 5, 2021 20:56
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:I still like Mason Dunne, but maybe that's just because his figure in the game was pretty good and as a 13 y.o. you don't notice the problems with some of those scenes I think the biggest problems with Ghost War were all Stackpoleisms. Normally I'm a pretty ardent defender of Stackpole, he's not as bad as everyone says and the thing he's known best for (Stackpoling) is something he did one time explicitly as an "Oh, gently caress, I might have enough time to pull this off but this is really stupid and we're probably going to die" forced overload / forced heroism moment; and it's really Pardoe that makes 'Mechs detonate left, right, and center. Stackpole does not handle subtlety or nuance well. He's perfectly fine if he can tell a story that's at least surface-level black and white, but the moment he needs to blend in shades of gray his novels fall apart. Ghost War really demanded a little more nuance to be good. Imagine: we get the same manipulative rear end in a top hat Mason Dunne except: After he gets himself and all of Space Greenpeace killed/arrested (after tricking them into committing violent terrorism), the Paladin that comes to his aide isn't his long-leggy big-titty girlfriend who immediately makes out with him but is instead "unreasonably hostile" because she both instantly recognizes him and hates his guts because this isn't the first time one of his operations has gotten a whole bunch of civilians killed right under her nose. Mason then goes back to Terra at the midpoint and rather than Victor explaining that yes, the Republic are the setting's new good guys who will have to make some hard choices in this post Space 9/11 world; Victor instead reassures Mason that "No, no, Mason my surrogate son, you really are a good guy who does good work for the Republic. Have I, You can then spend the second half of the book having Mason quietly manipulate Big Tiddy Paladin Girlfriend into a position where she's once again forced to back him up once he uncovers the terrible secret that Space Donald Trump is secretly an evil rear end in a top hat and "how could it be possible that the richest man in the Inner Sphere might be angry at the Republic for never making him a citizen?!" The story elements still remain mostly identical, but just having one single person in a position of actual authority call out Mason for his bullshit would've gone pretty far.
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May 5, 2021 21:18
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Good points, on the subject of Jacob Bannson meanwhile, he actually was a citizen, he wanted to be ennobled or knighted, which the Republic refused. Also, bad news for your Raiders PopTarts, Jacob Bannson disappeared in 3136 after being kidnapped by his disgruntled employees, so 3145 Space Donald doesn't exist, only Space Donald 3132. Also, now that I've reminded myself of SAFE's 9/11 false flag op, I still can't believe the cover of Pandora's Gambit got passed the censors. It's literally a civilian sky resort being blown up with people falling to their death down the side of a mountain.  I'm 99% sure Dark Age gave more love to Steiner and Marik in # of novels than any other era, I'm certain on that about Marik.
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May 5, 2021 22:16
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Not the first dead unit I've painted, and Bannson's Raiders still make good pirates and etc. I've also got a lance each of Dragon's Fury and Swordsworn, I have a sneaking suspicion the 8th Crucis Lancers probably didn't survive Liao in 3145, and once Wave 2 hits I'm going to have a full Trinary of Smoke Jaguars. The Jags are cheating a bit, since the Fidelis also use the same Gray/Dark Gray/Red colorscheme as Clan Smoke Jaguar's Nu Galaxy (they were barely trying to hide it, it's hilarious). I picked Nu Galaxy explicitly because they were stationed on Port Arthur. Bagpipes Intesify...  Edit: I also have a full trinary of lumpy, "off-model" MadCats painted in the same colors as the background mooks in the BattleTech cartoon. Basically, if it had chicken legs it got included so there's a Catapult in there--but when I say off model I really mean off model, one of them is a Kodiak. I really should get a group shot of those at some point. 
PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 22:48 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 22:40
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PoptartsNinja posted:I have a sneaking suspicion the 8th Crucis Lancers probably didn't survive Liao in 3145 Crucis Lancers are a pretty stable investment. Unless the FS redraws its maps, they're kind of married to there being eight Crucis Lancer units. And unlike the DCMS with the Swords of Light, they don't like having breaks in the sequence.
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May 5, 2021 23:24
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PoptartsNinja posted:Devlin Stone's master plan was "put myself in cryogenic sleep" (a technology that has not existed in BattleTech before), wait until the Great Houses finish disarming, and then destroy the HPG network so he could conquer them all in one fell swoop and complete the objective the Word of Blake programmed into him as a child. His two major downfalls were A) pissing off Daoshen Lao, ensuring that the Capellan Confederation would begin a major build up and always be laser focused on the Republic; and B) that someone set the plan in motion too soon and crippled the Republic before they hit Stone's Tripod Ubermech quota. One correction; they had actually brought up medical stasis tubes back in Handbook Periphery States (an old Star League tech only the Magistracy and Clans had apparently), so Stone putting himself in suspension isn't completely out of the blue. Honestly he hit the drat "King Arthur" myth crap too hard when he "vanished" for something like that NOT to be what was going on. I do appreciate Mr. Perfect WOB Warrior got his butt kicked by a descendent of Victor AND Katherine Steiner-Davion, which says all you need to know about his actual combat leadership abilities. Though now I can't wait to see what happens once Alaric proclaims the Inner Sphere should all bow down to him for claiming Terra, unless they pull a ton of super-army crap out of their butts to conquer everybody. Maybe he'll use Clan tech to create a copy of the Super Assassin to go deus ex machina on the IS elite? Though he better hope that wouldn't backfire and the copy reverts to his typical "Victor and those related to him must suffer" schtick.
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May 5, 2021 23:56
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Honestly the way the Republic got rolled in HOTW was pretty bad writing. They were little more than a speedbump when every other invasion of Terra was a costly drawn-out slug fest. I don't mind the Republic dying, but that... was pathetic. Alaric is gonna be hiding behind the Fortress wall for a while methinks. Ain't no secret army running to the rescue, unless he decides to make peace with Jonah Levin's Republic in Exile and recruit all their surviving units to beef up his nu-SLDF. On MasonDunne chat, his girlfriend Janella Lakewood (Another real good clix piece) has actual been in way more fiction than he has. Mason had Ghost War, a tiny Wizkids snippet from their news website, and just appeared in Shrapnel #4. Janella's appeared in something like 6 novels at this point, although sadly she's never really gotten a character, just a loyal Stone stalwart.
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May 6, 2021 00:31
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She's also the primary curator of Shattered Fortress, presumably the last document where the Republic will play the "trying to fill the role ComStar had as the narrative framer" role
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May 6, 2021 00:38
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I look forward to Clan Sea Fox being the new ComStar, except with trade rather than phone bills.
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May 6, 2021 00:47
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I mean, they're literally ComStar in the FWL. I assume the LC nationalized the ComStar facilities in the Commonwealth since they owed a jillion spacebucks to the Archon, and everyone else probably followed suit. Could be kind of interesting, having an interstellar communications grid run not by one neutral body, but by each government trying to use it to their advantage.
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May 6, 2021 01:16
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:But Stone wasn't making anyone subservient to him. He was just setting up his own nation out of the planets most devastated by the Jihad and a sore point for centuries between all the Great Houses. The Lyrans got to jettison a troublesome secession-happy region, Davion did the same, Liao and Marik fought to keep their poo poo but they got beat up so who cares. The Hegemony worlds needed a lot of work to recover and the Great Houses didn't want to spend the money on it. This is what gets me, one of the bigger nerds can correct me if I'm wrong, but the Isle of Skye is something like over half of the Lyrcom's industrial base. There's no way in hell they'd just be like "No sure Devlin Marysue you can have it."
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May 6, 2021 04:25
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PoptartsNinja posted:I don't hate what MW:DA tried to do. Getting more people interested in the setting is great, attracting new players is pretty vital for any game. But WizKids didn't put any thought into player retention. BattleTech was already a multimedia franchise, so you can't really praise MW:DA for doing something the setting had been doing since the late 1980s. BattleTech novels had a huge presence in bookstores in the 1990s and early 2000s. You were guaranteed to see Star Wars, Star Trek, and BattleTech in any bookstore you walked into. Amazon slowly strangling every bookstore in the world to death had more to do with BattleTech "dying" than anything, and until the Kickstarter, Catalyst really hadn't done a great job establishing a web presence. BattleCorps was this weird official/unofficial thing and charging for short stories just meant nobody was really signing up to read them. I'm going to agree with PTN here in that the death of brick and mortar bookstores have as much to do with the death of Battletech as anything else. Like it or not the miniatures game hasn't been the primary driver of BattleTech since FASA took the big nosedive, I'm trying to remember when I stopped seeing Ral Partha mini's in nerd stores and honestly? It was a long loving time ago. Clix breathing some life into the property for about 15 minutes probably isn't even a drop in the metaphorical bucket compared to every video game/novel release. I haven't seen battletech played at the hobby level since the early 00's, the ubiquitous Warhammer pretty much dominates all, with War Machines and a few other wargames like that making up the "lower stratum" of games actually played. Hell if you told me that the current resurgence of releases was entirely due to the Battletech game by HBS I wouldn't be shocked. And that wasn't set in the Dark age, for a reason.
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May 6, 2021 05:09
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I'm still holding out hope that No Actually We Are Smoke Jaguars takes out Alaric and goes "We're the ilClan, bitches!"
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May 6, 2021 05:31
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Rhymenoserous posted:This is what gets me, one of the bigger nerds can correct me if I'm wrong, but the Isle of Skye is something like over half of the Lyrcom's industrial base. There's no way in hell they'd just be like "No sure Devlin Marysue you can have it." Defiance Industries of Hesperus II is (barely) within the Skye Province but it got shifted into the Bolan province and isn't a traditional part of Skye. Also probably not 50%, especially not after the Jihad. The LC's key industrial worlds are Hesperus, Coventry, Tharkad, Furillo , Alarion and Skye, then there's some other stuff in there like Son Hoa, Loburg and Arc-Royal. The thing that's dumb about giving Skye away is that it's the biggest DropShip producer in the Commonwealth after Alarion is gone. If they'd broken down the yards and moved them I'd say fine, gently caress those guys, they'll come crawling back later.
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May 6, 2021 05:49
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Taerkar posted:I'm still holding out hope that No Actually We Are Smoke Jaguars takes out Alaric and goes "We're the ilClan, bitches!" This would make me forgive Hour of the Wolf for having the most boring, safe, and predictable outcome possible
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May 6, 2021 05:52
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After three years of them playing coy about who was invading Terra and having it be the obvious answer, I'm going to assume everything will resolve itself in the obvious fashion until they can prove otherwise. That was a loving embarrassment and I only hope the people involved are legitimately ashamed for stalling for so long and failing to come up with any other idea, so they ended up with a story that fails at basic dramatic structure.
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May 6, 2021 06:09
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Defiance Industries posted:After three years of them playing coy about who was invading Terra and having it be the obvious answer, I'm going to assume everything will resolve itself in the obvious fashion until they can prove otherwise. That was a loving embarrassment and I only hope the people involved are legitimately ashamed for stalling for so long and failing to come up with any other idea, so they ended up with a story that fails at basic dramatic structure. Having an ilClan eventually become a thing kind of irritates me. It honestly brought me a fair bit of pleasure that once they got their feet back under them that the Inner Sphere largely checked the clans without too many troubles. This makes a lot of sense as dueling formations have no place in any war consisting of more than five people. I feel the roots of this went all the way back to Theodore Kurita reforming the Draconis Combine to be A: Slightly Less Draconian (Har har) and largely promoting formations like the Ryuken and Genyosha who weren't all about shouting their lineage at you then having a 1 on 1, but setup more like Fedcom RCT's/Mercenary formations that are basically RCT's. Lets face it, if Hanse Davion had said "I give you, the Draconis Combine!" at his wedding instead of the Cappelan Confederation there's a decent chance his armies would have rolled the Combine pretty loving hard, because at the time Davion had seen the "Future" of warfare and it wasn't the small unit actions/dueling formations that both the Clans and the (At the time) Draconis Combine loved. It basically took the entire Clan Philosophy and way of live and took a healthy dump on it and I enjoyed it. Also Alaric Ward is a gross as gently caress Hapsburg baby.
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May 6, 2021 06:30
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Nah, Hanse doesn't put a dent in the Dracs, they've always had the Federated Suns' number. Nevermind that the Dracs had about 30 fewer regiments at the time than the Stealthy Foxes and Loki believed. House Kurita typically only offered a duel once and once the idiot in the Dragon got killed a swarm of Panthers ate your face.
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May 6, 2021 06:40
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| # ? May 31, 2024 09:40 |
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Alaric is loving lame and the scenes in Hour of the Wolf that just fellate him by telling us how scared everyone is of him are the most embarrassing thing in BT that doesn't involve rape or really bad ethnic stereotypes.
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May 6, 2021 06:40
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